What's the actual win here? Avoiding relay latency in the rare cases Tailscale can't punch through NAT? If that's it, a $3 VPS running Headscale seems simpler. The complexity feels like you're optimizing for the 5% case while adding permanent vendor lock in. What am I missing?
For many homelabbers, just being cheap and avoiding the $3 VPS, that's it
I dont even pay anything, my tiny homelab is completely covered by the free tier
What provider still has decent free tier?
Oracle. 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD. It’s arm64 but nowadays that doesn’t really matter.
That can't possibly be free?
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...Only caveat I see is they reserve the right to delete underutilized/ idling instances
I guess they require a credit card before accessing that free tier?
If they do: create a virtual one, create an account with it and delete the card right after.